Tag Archives: analogies

Although it’s not the most compelling story, this blog post is a terribly effective analogy. So effective, non-techies can read it and “get webhooks” … in some cases leading them to rally for webhooks as much as I do! The analogy focuses on a non-computer, real-world analogy based on telephone calls. Then it follows up with a more concrete example that helps explain the possibilities:

A concrete example of a story made possible from webhooks that might be a useful scenario for many of you involves Twitter. Let’s say Twitter supported webhook callbacks for when somebody follows you. Right now you get an email, and from there you can decide what to do manually: follow them back, block them, or do nothing. I used to go out of my way to block users that I knew were spam bots, but now there’s so many it’s not worth the time. And of course I also generally follow back people that I actually know. If Twitter would simply call a script of mine whenever somebody followed me passing along the user ID, I could very easily run this logic in a PHP script or a simple App Engine app. Or perhaps I’d use Scriptlets (ahem, which was made exactly for these kinds of web scripts). It would work like this:

First, use the Twitter API to look up the user from the ID, and grab their name. Then use the Facebook API to check if that name shows up in my list of friends on Facebook. If so, use the Twitter API to follow them back. Otherwise, if they’re following over 1000 users and that number is more than twice the number that’s following them (which is roughly the heuristic I use manually), use the Twitter API to block them. All automatic.

Definitely worth the read, if I do say so myself. It’s also worth pointing people that want a quick understanding of webhooks. What kind of analogies have you come up with?